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Flagrant Exhibitionism at the Petersen Auto Museum

One great thing about this column is that it gives me carte blanche to waste even more of my time thinking about cars, so when I visited L.A.'s Museum Row recently, I skipped Looted Treasures of Serbia at LACMA and the Shelf Paper show at the Museum of Folk Art, and headed straight for the Petersen Auto Museum. Appropriately sited on the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard that produced the first dedicated left turn lane and the first timed stoplight, the building has a soaring mid-mod facade embellished with what I believe are the tail fins from a '61 Imperial. What it doesn't have is a door off the street, a fact I discovered when I tried to enter the building from the sidewalk. Silly New Yorker, the entrance is around back by the parking lot!

So what's in a museum like this? Well … cars. Lots of pretty cars. The ground floor is organized in a timeline fashion, starting with dull, anemic early 20th century vehicles that look like a horse should be pulling them, working through the gorgeous "classic" era of the 1930s, getting bland and then overwrought during the '40s and '50s, returning to hotness in the slabby '60s and '70s, before getting totally sick during the '80s. Strangely, some of the vehicles in this exhibit were set up in fake "cityscapes," featuring things like period diners and ice cream stands. My favorite was a tableau of a typical 30s Main Street, complete with a grocery store employing a molded vinyl stockboy (hilariously slipping on a molded vinyl banana peel) as well as a rather scary molded vinyl fishmonger.

A futuristic Plexiglas escalator takes you to the special exhibit galleries upstairs. There was one full of celebrity cars, including a DeTomaso owned by my now second favorite hot auto-enthusiast actor, Steve McQueen. (Paul Newman recently regained first place.) There was a room full of chopped, shaved, and monstered-out hot rods, notable to me only for the historical photos of shirtless, grease-smeared mechanics. There was a show about alternative-energy vehicles, which featured a turbine-powered Dodge, a steam-powered French coupe, a bat-shit-crazy solar car, as well as a prototype for a gyroscope-guided, "curtain of energy" impact-protected, nuclear-powered hovercraft. (Too bad that didn't reach production, right?) Finally, there was a show on early RVs, full of jerry-rigged contraptions people bolted onto car frames to make them resemble rolling houses. I couldn't stop thinking of the mutual J.O. party I had with a friend in middle school during my one experience in his family's pop-top, and I had to leave the room.

Of course, I couldn't depart without hitting the gift shop. This is nearly as important as the displays in a museum like this. I considered a coffee table book on rare Ferraris (too boring) and some wicked Rat Fink T-shirts (too ironic) before settling on a set of shot glasses: because, obviously, nothing says "automobile" quite like drinking. Then I went across the street and stared at the LaBrea Tar Pits, reminding myself of what the whole car industry is built on: the sludge produced by decomposing mastodons.